The Importance of Community

There is strength in numbers. 

I've never been much of a "team player" in the context of sport. As a child, I participated in gymnastics and swimming. As a teen and young adult, I was a competitive freestyle wrestler. Now, I train for CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting. All of these activities are very independent and lack the dynamic of group sports.

Until recently, I didn't realize the extent to which group support had an effect on me. While training to compete in the sport of wrestling, I never trained by myself. We trained together as a team on the wrestling mats, we had group weight training sessions in the morning before class and when it came time, we ran together to cut weight before tournaments. As it turns out, I have learned that I need to be surrounded by those suffering from the same sort of self-induced agony for optimal performance.

Since I began CrossFit in 2007, the 12 months I spent training at CrossFit PEI in Charlottetown showed the greatest overall improvement in my skills and strength. There are a number of factors which contributed to this success such as good  coaching and programming, but today I want to discuss the positive effect of community.

CrossFit PEI Members at the 2014 Spring Fling

I fell in love with the CrossFit PEI community. Such a fun group of people to train with! This group of CrossFitters were varied and unique, I loved driving the 40 minutes from work to Charlottetown just to have privilege of training with them. Because of this, I rarely missed a work out and when I was at the gym - I busted my ass as much as possible. And this paid off in terms of performance. Just to name a few successes, I added 70 lbs to both my front & back squat 1RM personal records, I added 20 lbs to my snatch PR and 30 lbs to my clean and jerk. 

Have you ever performed better in front of a group than while training alone? With a bit of research, I have learned that this is known as the Köhler effect, which is a phenomenon that occurs when a person works harder as a member of a group than when working alone. The Köhler effect was first described in the 1920s by German psychologist Otto Köhler while studying members of a rowing club. Köhler found that when the rowers trained together in groups, that the group performance (endurance) persisted longer than that of the weakest members of the group were able to accomplish while training as individuals.

After returning to Ontario, I have found my performance to be somewhat reduced. This was quite surprising considering I had switched from CrossFit training to exclusively training for strength. At Royal City CrossFit, I was mainly training with my coach. Occasionally there would be another weightlifter on the platform with us, but this was not the norm. Recently since beginning my new job, I switched to morning workouts where I would go to the gym during a CrossFit class and lift on the platforms alone.  Each week, little by little, I found the lifts were becoming harder and my strength appeared to decrease. 


So why have I apparently become weaker? The answer, it seems, is that it's all in my head. I was getting very frustrated with my performance, until I dragged my ass in for a 7:00 pm weightlifting class at Royal City CrossFit. The change in my perspective, and in my performance, was almost immediate. I was affected by the Köhler effect. Just being in an environment where the platforms were full of lifters, where the music was loud and the cheers was contagious, resulted in my performance being better than it had been in months. I squatted more weight and was more consistent on my lifts, and the only reason that I can come up with is that there were other people in the room.


From now on, I plan to continue training in the evenings with the rest of the RC crowd who are interested in weightlifting. Even though we train independently and we are only competing against ourselves, it seems as though we feed off of each other's strength. There's something positive and motivating about good training communities. Fighting through a challenging session with a number of like-minded peers seems to offer more benefits than doing it alone. I look forward to continue to find strength in numbers among my weightlifting peers. Let's go lift all the things!